As part of the meeting, on Tuesday afternoon, a session on various aspects of geoarchaeology and environmental archaeology will be held. In this session, at which I will serve as the chair, there will be several talks, including:

1) Oren Ackermann, Safi geoarchaeologist, will give a paper on the long-term environmental effects of the destruction of Gath by Hazael

2) Udi Weiss and Sue Frumin, Safi archaeobotanists, will give a paper on the changes in plant species and plant-use seen in Philistia during the Late Bronze/Iron Age transition.

3) Yoav Avni (GSI) will talk about the collapse of agricultural systems and their environmental effect using the late Byzantine Negev as a case study.

4) Eli Ashkenazi will give a paper on abandoned agricultural fruit tree gardens in the Negev, planted by Bedouins decades ago, which still have viable fruit harvest till today.

Should be very interesting. Also, this is an important step to open up “communication” between ecologists, who almost always only study the last few decades, to the insights that archaeological studies of ancient ecological systems have – and how their effects can often be seen until today!